Integrated circuit manufacturing provides a substantial portion of the electronic components in use today. Although there are many different manufacturing processes for producing a finished integrated circuit, almost all of these processes have certain aspects in common. For example, it is common to fabricate integrated circuits on roughly circular semiconductor substrates, or wafers. Further, it is common to form such integrated circuits so that conductive regions disposed on, or close to, the uppermost layers of the integrated circuits are available to act as terminals for connection to various electrical elements disposed in, or on, the lower layers of those integrated circuits.
In conventional integrated circuit manufacturing processes it is common for terminals, such as those mentioned above to be brought into contact with probes for testing, and further to be contacted with bond wires or solder bumps for connection of the integrated circuit to a package, board, or similar environment.
Conventional integrated circuit manufacturing processes, typically produce fixed electrically conductive pathways, in the form of lines of metal, metal alloys, or metal laminate stacks. Generally these metal lines are unchangeable by the time a wafer is ready for testing and assembly. Although, it is noted that, it is known to make minor changes to the fixed interconnect pattern subsequent to the conventional manufacturing process by means such as laser editing, fuse blowing, or focused ion beam cutting or deposition. However, these methods are not suitable for making any large scale changes to the fixed interconnect pathways of individual integrated circuits, and certainly are not suitable for making such changes to a large number of integrated circuits as would be found in a manufacturing environment.